Sammy Kitula and Agencies
27 April 2008
Nairobi — As Kenya's national athletics team leaves on Sunday for this year's Africa Athletics Championship in Ethiopia, head coach, Julius Kirwa, is not a worried man.
Kenya might have withered under intense Ethiopian heat in Edinburgh during last month's World Cross Country Championships, but Kirwa has total confidence in the team to the Addis Ababa championships.
Not even the full strength team named by the hosts on Friday - that includes world champions Kenenisa Bekele, Tirunesh Dibaba and Meseret Defar - will rattle his resolve.
"What happened in Edinburgh is long forgotten. We have a very strong team and I'm sure that we will come back with medals, apart from securing Olympic slots," said Kirwa on Saturday. Kenya will be keen to defend the overall title they won last time in Bambous and Port Louis in Mauritius two years ago.
However, running within the Olympic qualifying times will require special efforts at high altitude.
High altitude
The host city Addis Ababa stands at 2,400m above sea level making it more difficult for athletes to post good times. Although coach Kirwa expects the team to perform better than they did during the World cross country championship, he has conceded that Kenya's inexperienced team of long distance runners will have to produce something special to overcome tough opposition at the continental event especially from the hosts. Kirwa said they had to settle for the young runners, after elite athletes failed to show up for the national trials.
The 31-year-old Kenyan won Great Run events in Sunderland and Portsmouth over 10 kilometres and 10 miles. Australia's 2004 World Cross Country champion Benita Johnson and Aniko Kalovics of Hungary will be among Cheruiyot's main rivals.
Former European Cross Country title holder Hayley Yelling also runs.
Like many of her Kenyan colleagues, Cheruiyot can competing at world-class level over distances from 10 kilometres to the marathon.
She has won the 2005 Berlin 25km road race, whilst three years earlier she took the German capital's half-marathon title. Cheruiyot also stormed to a great victory in the 2006 Amsterdam marathon, after finishing runner-up over the same distance in Hamburg.
Last year, the Finn achieved close to everything in his sport, though the year also gave him the lowest point of his career. He won gold in the world championships in Osaka, Japan, and was chosen as the European Athlete of the Year as well as the Sportsman of the Year in Finland, beating Formula One champion Kimi Raikkonen.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Nation. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
